I just share with you
DOS was also single user desktop system, and their users was not all six dan experts in computer magic … they could deal with it before “windows” graphical shell appeared … for many years.
Also 8-bit home computers required to know such called black holes – those were actually very colorful : think about Commodores – as they had only keyboard and screen and a basic interpreter built-in and that’s all.
The truth is all later generations think about computers as how they met them.
In the '50s-'60s-‘70s of last century people possibly met computers personally if they worked on a university, a military/government facility program, science laboratory or big enterprises’ data center as they were huge mainframes or mini computers and then the computer for single user was only a computer terminal that was not a software feature of a system, but a real hardware stuff : keyboard and screen … so GUI enthusiasts should not forget computers first had TERMINALS
They were not multimedia centers, however there were applications - then called programs - on them, to use for average users too
as accountants, clerks, secretariats, nurses, librarians, receptionists, etc.
OK, I finished - I would not intend to lecture anyone by my sentences just point out that such interface determined for many people for decades how they think about / interact with computers.
You are just so lucky in these times you are enabled now to ignore or even hate those ‘so ugly’ legacy methods.
Peace and love … with a smiling Buda
( that pic upload now unfortunately fails for my side )
@ KitsunePrefecture What can I say? Humans are creatures of habits. Therefore, it always makes sense to go with the state of the art (Okay, maybe not always install all innovations immediately ). Of course, the users used to work with command line programs, but they were also trained for this (in the vocational training). Today, anyone can buy a PC and work with it, and certainly not because everyone opens their manual and gets stuck in it. That’s why I prefer to stay in the present and rarely refer to the past.
Furthermore, a lot can go wrong when using command line programs if you don’t know how to do it. Files are quickly lost or changed in such a way that they are no longer usable. A sane GUI will not allow this.
What I’m finding frustrating is the default way to launch and SEARCH applications.
The Quicklaunch app helps a bit, but when you have a huge amount of apps installed and you don’t remember the name of what you are looking for… That’s frustrating because you are forced to scroll the entire (leaf) menu and read all the names in hope that a bell sounds in your memory.
What hurges me to propose this it’s that we have a database filesystem and we can use it to help us finding the program we are looking for, for example:
we are looking for the browser webpositive, but we don’t remember its name. Why don’t use a stripped down function of “find” (the one in the leaf menu) for finding the words “browser”, “internet”, “web”, “webpositive”? It’s one of the (few) nice things I appreciate of Gnome3 (or the windows start menu?). But instead of using an external database as in linux, we have it already there, just under the feet.
Of course I know the possibility, still I mentioned the “default way” and still it’s a slow way to search apps and needs some more clicking and moving around mouse, which slows the operation, still is a brain (not so much) “intensive” task, because you have to look for the directory (for example you have to remember that the browser is in “network” folder) and then read the entries and “decode” them for matching what you want (because there are apps that do other things than browsing, wasting your cpu cicles in your mind)
Well if you are talking about my aunt yes for sure
what I mean is Super + br (…owser) and maybe down arrow (similar to GNOME)
is faster than making clicks, eyes-searchings, read every entry and mouse precision movements. This at least in my personal experience. And we can use directly the filesystem to perform the app searching. This does not mean getting rid of actual application menu in Deskbar, but adding an alternative function would be helpful (as in Windows).
Or maybe it’s a feature that can be implemented in Qucklaunch, but it needs the translators support.
it can search the default localized app name and the localized attribute for easy finding, for example “disvilup” (which means development in my language) for ide apps. This means as well that a specific catkeys string should be read and the localized string saved as an attribute to the app file in the filesystem.
Application launch menu is probably the only thing I don’t like in Haiku. It’s slow and unintuitive. I’d rather just have an Applications folder alias on the Desktop.
Something like QuickLaunch or integrating QuickLaunch into Haiku at some point seems like a necessity. Everyone has gotten used to such tools by this point.
IIRC, menu sorting could be done automatically using packages categories. If someone is interested in implementing that, it would be worthy to dig old forum posts as the subject has been discussed several times already.
Sorry I don’t have much to say about this other than to say that the vision I see for the future is to get rid of the Application menu from Deskbar and replace with a regular folder plus a dock of saved apps but that is still a ways off.
Well, maybe keep the menu, but have an option for those that need an Application folder, à la macos. So the users can choose what better fits the way they use the system and their tastes / abilities.
We already have a selection of docks (LaunchBox is built-in, personally I prefer LnLauncher) and it is possible to open the Applications menu in Tracker, but it suffers the limitations of Tracker for “blue folders” and queries (no icon view, no saving of the icon layout).
But I’m not sure that’s a great solution. I would keep the menu and enable some kind of typeahead filtering in it (in addition to restoring the ability of opening the Application menu as a proper Tracker window).
I’m not sure a quicklaunch-only solution is great, is it considered discoverable enough these days? A few years backk it was considered confusing, but maybe now people have been forced to learn it from other OS and we can consider it’s something they will immediately understand? Not sure we’re there and not sure we’ll ever get there.
I like the ability to just see a list of everything installed, and not having to type some search terms to start seeing something.
That being said, I think this issue has been discussed over and over again over the years, and I’m not sure there is a point in discussing it again. Is someone going to write the code or is this just yet another forum topic?
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